Servant songs

The servant songs (also called the servant poems or the Songs of the Suffering Servant) are four songs in the Book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible, which include Isaiah 42:1–4; Isaiah 49:1–6; Isaiah 50:4–11; and Isaiah 52:13–53:12. The songs are four poems written about a certain "servant of YHWH" (Hebrew: עבד יהוה, ‘eḇeḏ Yahweh). Yahweh calls the servant to lead the nations, but the servant is horribly abused by them. In the end, he is rewarded.

Some scholars regard Isaiah 61:1–3 as a fifth servant song, although the word "servant" (Hebrew: עבד, ‘eḇeḏ) is not mentioned in the passage.^[1] This fifth song is largely disregarded by modern scholars; without it, all four fall within Deutero-Isaiah, the middle part of the book, which some believe to be the work of an anonymous 6th-century BCE author writing during the Babylonian Exile. The five songs were first identified by Bernhard Duhm in his 1892 commentary on Isaiah.^[2]